Design Research and Strategy
The interview guide is not as important a document as most people think. Most if not all qualitative research would be improved if researchers stopped focusing on the guide, and focused more on the research questions.
Many qualitative researchers have had this very same experience: the client wants to add too many questions focusing too narrowly [...]
Categories: Blog · Research Methods · brand · ethnography · market research · methods · qualitative research
Christmas shopping season is in full swing, but one retail company stands out for its message: don’t buy our stuff. That’s right, Patagonia is telling its customers that they should NOT buy more of its products. From their blog:
What kind of crazy reverse psychology is this? Is Patagonia trying to fool its customers into buying [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · ethnography · home · market research · qualitative research
Autumn Rituals: Buying Jeans
Ritual plays an important role in our lives. Emile Durkheim noted in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual bookends our experience of time:
The division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.
Time passes, in part, because we create rituals to signal [...]
Categories: Blog · anthropology · brand · culture · home · market research · sociology · time
I loved it when I first saw it. Brandtags.net invites users to look at a logo and type in the first thing that enters their minds. I found it fascinating — until I realized it’s yet another example of poor research perpetuating negative stereotypes of women.
Type in “Oprah” and see what happens. The top three [...]
Categories: Research Methods · brand · product design · qualitative research
Brands have few opportunities to come alive, and the Web is one of those opportunities. Make sure the brand gives off the right impression. Researchers have found that a company’s Web site particularly shapes how a person views that company’s innovation and concern for its customers. In other words, the Web site is even more [...]
Categories: brand · customer satisfaction · design · goffman · qualitative research · user experience